Moork

Ah, I see, I was thinking the pool was only refreshed periodically rather than instantly - but I guess that would have caused the problems people raised with hiring large numbers of soldiers at once.As you suggest, perhaps recruitment from dissatisfied regions could still be blocked as a mostly cosmetic feature. Thanks, and yeah, when your as cool as Harlock mere physics are of no consequence

It would be neat if the visible pool of soldiers was dependent on your relationship with the funding regions. So if a couple of regions were hostile to you then the pool would drop to say 10 visible soldiers, to reflect that there's a smaller pool of elite soldiers available for you to recruit from (you could even stop soldiers from the various nation's in each hostile region appearing in the list). It would slightly ramp up the difficulty in the late game, but have no effect early on. Probably a lot of work for a very small feature, but I reckon it would be a nice touch.

I don't think the blue needs changing (I don't get the SWAT vibe), but I think it should be fairly easy to change if you wanted to mod it.I haven't had a chance to try the newer builds in a while, I think the one I currently have is from sometime around september last year, but I had a quick go at reskinning the basic suit colour a while back and it seemed fairly easy. The suit colour is unique in the build I have (this might change with exotic weapons and whatnot), but in its present state its fairly easy to remap to a different colour while retaining all the shading/skin/weapons. I spent a couple minutes changing one sprite to test, but if you spent a little longer making sure you had the right colour remapping, so you weren't losing any detail, then ran a batch job across the folders it shouldn't take very long. Of course it's still going to be a bit of hack ... but if it really bothers you it seems easy enough to mod

You should be able to use afterburners already (unless I'm misunderstanding your suggestion?). They are currently a toggle next to the Roll maneuver that burns additional fuel when active, if you turn them on prior to retreating then they stay active while you retreat.

I know at the moment if the shedship or chinook areas intersect with a sub-map (even if it's just by one tile) then the entire sub-map is completely removed. I figured that the UFOs and transports would all be on the same sized sub-maps, but smaller UFOs would have more random items around them (signs, wreckage, barrels, fencing, paving, broken structures etc). So you could randomly end up with a UFO half embedded in a building, but it wouldn't actually insert it into pre-existing stuff on the map. As pointed out though, this probably wouldn't work for really large ships as it would mean the smallest ships would need heaps of random stuff around them and that might lead to combinations that look out of place on some maps.

I created a slightly smaller map populated with a maze of custom sub-maps each filled with shipping containers and a single office block off in one corner. It worked quite nicely - the shipping containers created lots of narrow alcoves and small openings to setup crossfire or take cover in. The only real issue I noticed was with the alien shedship and chinook placement, I know you can move them around using the levelsetup file, but I don't see how that will work in an ordinary game, unless the levelsetup file will end up defining spawn locations for all the different maps? I would've thought it would be easier to add the spawn locations as part of each map (as a special sub-map in the level editor).